Endgame Viable

I don’t know why I did it. I knew I was going to react to Monster Hunter Wilds in the exact same way that I did to Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise: A perplexed face and a burning curiosity about why these games are so popular.

But I was looking for something to play on the PS5 now and then and it’s a good game for that. I don’t feel bad about not recording it or not finishing it. (Although I am hitting the “save last 30 minutes of gameplay” button after every monster fight anyway.)

For context, as of this writing, according to the PS5, I’ve played 11 hours and completed 30% of the game.

I also need to make it clear that, following my standard video game practice, I haven’t looked up any guides on the Internet on how to play the game. So there’s a good chance I’m doing everything wrong. (Actually I did look up how to find endemic life for those side quests where you’re supposed to capture them, because the game doesn’t give you a marker for where they are. I just wanted to confirm that the expected game loop was to wander around in the world until you stumbled on them, like a cave man playing a game from the 90s. For other side quests, the game auto-runs you right to where you’re supposed to go, but this one thing it doesn’t.)

Here are the last several monsters I killed in the main story. I think they are “large monsters” in game parlance, or what the rest of the world calls “bosses.” (All the ones before this were really easy.)

There was an Alpha Doshaguma, which looked kind of like a big bear. It seemed like it was inevitable that I would win the fight, even though I “fainted” twice. It was the first time I fainted in the game, but it was no big deal–I just ran back to the boss and continued where I left off. (Reminding me of later Guild Wars 2 boss fights, where it was impossible to fail no matter how many times you died.)

Then I killed something called an Uth Duma, and I’m sure those two words instantly conjure up a vivid image of what it looks like (a gigantic seal with a snake head and gossamer flaps). This has been the hardest one so far for me, and the first monster that I actually failed to kill, because I fainted three times (mostly from bad luck, imo), so it took two tries to complete that kill. The second time I called in a “Support Hunter” Rosso (a bot, I assume) but it didn’t really seem to help much, other than yelling encouragement now and then in that “we can win with the power of friendship!” way that all anime stuff has. However, I did kill it with only one fainting spell the second time so maybe it was doing more than I thought. (It’s hard to tell because the bosses don’t have health bars.) This was the boss that I discovered you can jump on top of the monster’s back and hit them in the top of the head, a feat I don’t fully understand how I did, but I somehow managed to do it a couple of times.

Then it was a Rompopolo, a fairly easy monster that I described as a T-Rex with a crow face, covered with ballooning airbags. I just hit it repeatedly until it died, no fainting required. I had the ranged Support Hunter Rosso for this one too (because I forgot to turn that feature off), but it also didn’t seem to help much.

The last monster I killed was a Rey Dau, which at first I thought looked like a copy-paste of the Fallingstar Beasts in Elden Ring, but it has wings (with pretty strong arms attached somehow–Darwin sure would be interested in how these creatures evolved) and lightning breath. It was tougher, but not that much. I fainted once, and when I got up and rode back, I hit the beast exactly one time and killed it. (I had Rosso the ranged Support Hunter for this one, too. After this I finally remembered to turn them off… the setting is in a very obscure location so it’s easy to miss it.)

The fighting seems to go faster than the previous games, which I like a lot. I remember timing out a few times on quests in Monster Hunter World. I still don’t like it much when the boss runs away to a new location, because it just feels like it’s dragging the fight out for no particular reason. It doesn’t feel like I’m solving any game problems by simply following a monster to its new location. The only question the game is asking there is: Will you remember to sharpen your blade or not?

For the record I use the big sword thingy that you start with. After this last fight I’m Hunter Rank 4, and upgraded my armor to Rompopolo gear (which looks ridonkulous), and my sword to a Hope Blade III. (Previously I think it was a Bone Blade II.)

The story is telling me there is something called a White Wraith coming up, which is, for some reason, highlighted with purple. All the characters were awestruck on viewing it for the first time before it flew away, so I guess I’m supposed to be terrified of it too. But so far I don’t see any reason to change my complex go-to strategy of running straight up to things and hitting the triangle button until they’re dead.

As for the story, I haven’t been paying any attention and have skipped large portions of the dialog, so I don’t know why any of the characters in the game, especially me, are out wandering around killing big monsters. There’s something about a kid from a long-lost village who’s really mad at the White Wraith or something. I don’t know.

The music seems pretty generic. And the voice work. Most characters do a breathy exhale at the end of every line delivery, which nobody does in real life but is fairly common in the anime style. Once I hear it, I can’t un-hear it and it completely undermines any attempt at serious dialog because it makes me chuckle. Otherwise nobody seems to have any personality and I feel nothing for any of the NPCs. It’s pretty clear the story is only there because AAA games are expected to have stories, so they have to check that box.

I have two theories on why these games are popular.

One is that maybe the game changes into a completely different experience if you play co-op with other people, and that’s really the thing that people like. I have a feeling that a lot of mediocre games disguise themselves as really fun when you play them with your friends, because what you’re feeling is the enjoyment of hanging out with your friends, rather than anything intrinsically fun about the game. Which is fine, but when I play that game by myself I’m left wondering what all the fuss is about.

My second theory is that these Monster Hunter games are made for people who only like to do dungeons and raids in MMORPGs, because you can sort of skip right to the boss fights. There is a pretty strong MMORPG vibe to the game in general, especially if you like resource-gathering.

But the boss fights… aren’t that great. To me, at least. They’re faster than previous games, which is awesome, but they’re still pretty tedious, and there isn’t much tactical thinking involved, at least in the first 30% of the game. (Which is another reminder of MMORPG boss fights where “difficulty” is achieved by giving every boss a million hit points so that the biggest challenge is paying attention while you’re dying of boredom inside, like it’s an office presentation or something.) I haven’t had to do anything special to prepare for these boss fights yet, other than eating some food now and then. I haven’t had to learn any new combat skills or anything. I just run up and hit the big thing over and over until it’s dead or I’m dead.

The animations are kind of cool, though, and the scenery is nice. There’s a nice “feel” and “weight” to landing a blow with a huge sword on a monster, which I like. (I do tend to prefer heavy weighty weapons in games, rather than fast lightweight weapons that defy physics.) But it doesn’t feel like I’ve done anything particularly noteworthy when I kill monsters. It seems like literally anyone could do this.

Maybe these are the kind of games that only get good when you reach some arbitrary “endgame” point, which is another thing that reminds me of MMORPGs. World of Warcraft, for example, where so many people speedrun through the leveling process to reach the endgame, where the fun actually begins for them.

In conclusion, I’ll say that I’m liking Monster Hunter Wilds more than the previous two games, so I feel like they’ve successfully tweaked the formula for the better. It seems more streamlined and less clunky than previous games. It gets more fun the longer I play. With each new monster you kill in the main story, it unlocks a few more options you can explore. I think I just unlocked Armor Spheres. I also see there’s a bunch of Weapon Skills displayed on a page somewhere but I haven’t interacted with that system at all yet. It’s kind of fun to do the optional side missions so you can gather resources to make different kinds of armor and weapons.

Still, I don’t think this franchise is ever going to reach game-of-the-year material for me because I feel like I could leave the game at any time and not feel like I’m missing anything.

Dispatches from @[email protected]:

19:02 # Started watching American Primeval on Netflix. I love a good grimdark western but man this is the grimdarkiest grimdark one I’ve seen in a while. The west was apparently indistinguishable from Monty Python’s Holy Grail-style rainy, muddy medieval Europe, except there’s no jokes.

21:59 # How do I find the like, I don’t know, serious books on Audible now? Browsing the front pages for a new book, especially in the sff category, is so depressing.

14:29 # I started an audiobook of Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold. Not really into this audiobook so far. I really liked the First Law series, but I read those. I remember almost nothing of the story, but I remember it mainly for having good, interesting characters. Not seeing that in Best Served Cold so far.

15:37 # Somehow I managed to drive to the store, buy stuff, and walk back out to the car with my belt unbuckled.

15:58 # I keep forgetting to write stuff here. Yesterday it snowed all day. Maybe 3 or 4 inches. No big deal, today it’s already melted off all road surfaces.

16:06 # I tried out the new game Avowed last night, by the same people who did Pillars of Eternity. It’s basically Pillars of Eternity except in a 3D action RPG form instead of 2D. It has a bit of a janky AA kind of feel to it, but I like it. Looks nice, deep lore, interesting RPG systems, decent dialog trees, and combat is frickin’ hard on hard difficulty. Sort of Oblivion-esque but you can also do a third person camera. Not bad so far.

16:36 # Yeesh I had a number of subscriptions going that I had completely forgotten about, including a FFXIV sub.

19:13 # Hey I finished the story in Dragon’s Dogma 2 tonight. None of it made any sense from beginning to end, so it was consistent throughout.

08:55 # Good news, everyone! I found eggs at the store yesterday.

12:41 # I logged in FFXIV for the first time since… I dunno, 2021? 2022? Well, not really. I just got to the title screen and list of characters then quit. I wish there was a way to see which FC I’m in (if any) before I actually log in with a character. The last thing I ever want to do with a video game is give anyone a chance to notice I’m online playing. Haven’t wanted to do that since the late 90s. It’s basically the same as walking into a crowded room. Gross. Icky.

10:42 # Is anyone else getting tired of every male video game voice actor’s breathy exhale at the end of every phrase?

12:24 # I fell into a rabbit hole watching Smosh reads reddit post videos. I’ve blocked this sort of content before (“my super original content is just reading other people’s content woo”) but it’s better than usual and hilarious and horrifying how many horrible people are out there in the world. I don’t have a high opinion of humanity to start with but sheesh it’s a frickin’ miracle there isn’t a new serial killer arrested every single day.

After another bout of cold weather and snow, there are now signs of spring returning. The last week has been fairly mild weather up into the 60s.

Breaking news: I played more Dragon’s Dogma 2! PanPan rides again! Actually jogs. A lot. Anyway, I got to what I thought was the last couple of quests in the main story (after the big iron golem thingy), and then I thought I’d complete all the side quests that will supposedly get locked out if you finish the main story. Then I got bored with the side quests and decided to finish the game. Somehow I ended up fighting a big dragon twice. But I got to the credits.

I finished the game at level 40 and felt extremely overleveled. There were very few times in the entire course of the game where I felt the slightest bit challenged by any of the game systems. I did exactly nothing to optimize my character. Combat was easy for the vast majority of the game. Crafting was useless from start to finish. The story made no sense at any point as plot threads were started and abandoned at regular intervals (I think it must have been mistranslated? Whatever happened to Sven or Disa?!?). Dragon’s Dogma is the weirdest, most opaque RPG franchise that has ever existed, as far as I’m concerned. It’s impossible to figure out how to do any of the quests without reading a guide.

I impulsively bought Avowed when I saw it on Steam one day, Obsidian’s new first/third-person action RPG set in the Pillars of Eternity universe. Pillars of Eternity is a “must play” game in the single-player CRPG space, in my opinion, especially if you ever liked the original Baldur’s Gate.

Avowed is a totally different type of game, and it has a little bit of a janky AA vibe (you know, where everything clips through everything else and your foot movement never quite matches up with the ground and the gravity is like you’re on Mars), but it’s fun so far. It’s in the vein of a Skyrim, but set in Pillars of Eternity’s Eora universe. You’ll recognize a lot of the lore if you’ve played PoE (otherwise, 75% of the words in the game will be gibberish because it’s one of those fantasy worlds where they invent a new word for literally everything).

Anyway Avowed might be my next video series.

Surprise, surprise, there was another Steam Next demo festival. It’s hard enough to look at a huge list of available games and try to divine which ones might be fun, innovative, and engaging over 30+ hours, when you know for sure that only 1 in 1000 is going to be worth your time, so I have no idea what it’s like to get excited about looking over another huge list of demos.

That being said, I would have tried the Solasta II demo, but I know for sure I’m going to buy it when it comes out, so why spoil anything.

Like flicking a light switch, I suddenly started back into video production mode. Weird how that works. One day, I have no interest in playing games or talking about them, the next day, I’m playing games and talking about them.

I got a new lightweight hypercardoid XLR headset microphone (an Audio-Technica PRO 8HEx Hypercardioid Dynamic Headworn Microphone), but it doesn’t sound very good. It’s too “thin.” It’s fantastically light and easy to wear, though. (But it does not have headphones, it’s just a microphone.) The other bad news is that it’s a little awkward to wear with glasses. Ah well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I’ve switched my OBS video encoder settings to the new-ish NVIDIA NVENC HEVC encoder, which is supposedly higher quality/more efficient/better compression. I tried the new AV1 encoders (the cutting edge of the video future, apparently), but my recording PC CPU (from all the way back in the dark ages of 2016) is way too slow to handle them.

Trying a different heading every time until one sounds right.

This is heavily inside baseball, but I’ve (finally) updated my video post-processing scripts to use one master configuration file for all project directories, which can be overridden for each individual project. As opposed to before, where I had to keep copying a gigantic configuration file to every new project directory even though 95% of the settings where the same all the time.

The configuration sets things like audio mixing settings and encoding settings and directory names on a per-project basis. Each “project” is a series of videos that eventually get turned into a YouTube Playlist.

Someday I want to publish my scripts (they’re in Python) but I’m too embarrassed about how messy they are right now. I’m a professional programmer, I can’t be putting out garbage code.

Who even knows what’s happening anymore. I spend about 50% of my time writing Java code and the other 50% of my time trying to figure out how we can possibly make any progress on our deliverables when we have so many dependencies causing us to wait on other teams. There’s also a fear that the amount of Java work is diminishing fairly quickly, leaving nothing but Python work or Next.js Typescript work. Neither option is very appealing to me personally for various reasons (the Python work is mostly data analysis and the Next.js work is often ill-defined because there isn’t yet a product owner with a clear vision for the frontend). And incidentally we’ve been under a crushing company-wide moratorium for several months now that prevents us from any production releases until we implement a series of unhelpful hoop-jumping checks in the deployment pipeline that give us green checkmarks on leadership dashboards. And oh by the way, coming up soon, we’ll be having to shoehorn some kind of AI integration into a product that clearly doesn’t need any AI integration, because that’s literally the only thing the company cares about anymore.

I was working on casseroles for a while, but I’ve been in a soup phase lately. As always, my version of cooking is based on the founding principle of “never spend too much time cooking or eating” so my version of soup is to pour many things purchased from a store into a pot and turn on the heat.

In this case, it’s chicken soup, and I make it by cooking a couple of chicken breasts, cutting them up, then putting them into a pot with: lower sodium chicken stock, some water, frozen vegetables (my store has a very convenient vegetable soup mix), a can of diced tomatoes, and a small can of “heart healthy” (lower sodium) cream of chicken soup, and let it cook for an hour or so. The end result is a pot of soup that lasts me about five days, and I have to believe is marginally more healthy than store-bought cans of soup.

Next I’m going to try a vegetable beef soup which will be essentially the same, except substituting beef broth and chopped-up beef for the chicken.

Incidentally, I’ve started an experiment with something called Ground.news which purports to give a “balanced” aggregation of news stories from sources across the political spectrum.

It’s been 39 days in Trump’s Russia-First administration. I know the whole Russian interference thing in 2016 was blown out of proportion, but it’s really easy to see why a rational person might wonder if Trump is a foreign asset considering he was cuckolded by Putin and surrendered American interests to Russia within a month of his second inauguration. Siding with Belarus and North Korea along the way. What’s next, Mr. Trump, selling nuclear weapons to Iran?

There’s a lot of things to criticize Trump for (and even an occasional thing or two to commend him for, believe it or not), but with my biases of being a child of the Cold War firmly on display, this has to be the most embarrassing American loss on the worldwide stage in our history. Worse than Vietnam, worse than Korea, worse than Afghanistan. Just wholesale surrender and abdicating any semblance of being a superpower, right out in front of everybody.

Then again, it’s entirely possibly Mr. Trump could (and did) go from calling Zelensky a dictator criminal one day to welcoming him into the White House the next. So it’s really hard to figure out where to direct one’s righteous outrage against the government when conditions change radically every day, as if our country is being led by a drunken sailor staggering from one rail to the other, vomiting word salad everywhere.

The Weave? More like The Stagger, amirite?

Bye!

This wasn’t what I planned for my next “game video production” post but Roger mentioned a topic on the Blaugust Discord that I hadn’t heard before, which led me down a deep rabbit hole on the subject of variable frame rate and constant frame rate in video files.

Roger was having an issue with audio drifting out of sync with the video over time, which is something I’ve never seen before in my OBS videos. At least not that I remember. Or at least not in a way that wasn’t attributable to an audio sample rate mismatch (44.1 versus 48).

He determined his issue is that OBS records “variable frame rate” or VFR videos, as opposed to “constant frame rate” or CFR, and his video editor (Corel something I think?) was having trouble working with them.

I’d never heard of this issue in OBS or a distinction between VFR and CFR videos, so I turned to my go-to search and research tool for technical information, which is ChatGPT and ChatGPT Search, because it’s about a thousand million times faster and better than Googling or DuckDuckGoing.

What I learned shocked me to my core.

Not really, but it was all new to me. Unfortunately none of my research is going to help Roger because his situation is vastly different from mine.

It turns out that every video I’ve been recording in OBS and uploading to YouTube for the last nine years (or at least the most recent ones I checked from the last week) are, indeed, VFR videos. I had always assumed they were 60 fps because, you know, OBS says it records at 60 fps, but it turns out they average 60 fps, and there’s some variance in the frame rate.

Both the MKV and the remuxed MP4 videos that OBS generates are variable frame rate, despite MediaInfo telling me (incorrectly, it turns out) that the MKV files are CFR. (MediaInfo is a new tool to me, but it seems fine, if you discount the fact that it’s wrong sometimes.)

However, OBS recorded files (remuxed or not) have never been a problem for me. I only load maybe 1 out of 50 videos I record into a video editor, and I’ve never noticed any sync issues in those cases. This is despite the Internet wisdom, which I just learned in the past day, that you should always convert VFR videos into CFR before loading them into a professional video editor, because professionals only do CFR, thank you very much. Meanwhile, I’ve never done that and suffered no ill effects.

I’ve been using Davinci Resolve for the last couple of years, and before that I used Movie Studio Platinum which was ruined by MAGIX. I never once noticed game audio drifting out of sync because of a variable frame rate.

That’s not to say there weren’t issues… it’s just that I didn’t notice them, or I worked around them somehow without identifying a cause.

I have occasionally noticed the audio tracks from OBS videos will be a slightly different length than the video tracks, but it’s never been enough of a difference to move the audio far enough out of sync to matter. We’re talking less than a second of difference over hour-long videos. More like less than a tenth of a second.

If I ever needed to fix that, which would have been almost never, but I’m sure it’s happened once or twice, I would grab the end of the audio track clip and drag it to snap to the end of the video track clip. (Which would just remove the extra bit of audio off the end, or if I needed to I could hold down control or alt or whatever key it is and it would resample the audio to match the new length.)

All of the audio sync issues I’ve ever found troublesome are attributable to audio interface delays. (I’ve mostly solved that now by using an ASIO driver OBS plugin for my main microphone.)

Roger mentioned Internet advice to set force-cfr=1 in the Custom Muxer Settings to force OBS to generate CFR videos. It’s still a top search result.

I can conclusively report that setting force-cfr=1 in the Custom Muxer Settings does absolutely nothing and the Internet is dead wrong. Definitely not the first time I’ve seen the Internet be wrong on a popular search result.

There may have been a time in the past when that worked, but it doesn’t work anymore. In any case, that would only affect the remuxed MP4 video files, and not the original MKV file that OBS records.

My understanding is that OBS uses ffmpeg to perform the remux operation, and there is no such setting documented for the ffmpeg mp4 muxer. You can type ffmpeg -h muxer=mp4 to verify. End of story.

In any case, you can’t “fix” VFR just by remuxing.

So this is where things get complicated.

Based on my understanding of how video files are encoded, it’s not possible to “remux” a video from VFR to CFR. “Remuxing” is a term that essentially means changing the video container format without changing or re-encoding the actual contents of the video data.

CFR is not just a flag that’s set somewhere in the file. Whether a video is VFR or CFR is determined by examining the time stamp (officially called the PTS or “presentation time stamp”) of every frame in the video. If every single time stamp is snapped to a regular interval, the video is considered CFR. If even a single frame’s time stamp is off, it’s technically VFR.

Here’s the problem: In order to convert a video from VFR to CFR, the video needs to be re-encoded. Which takes time for one thing, but it also means there’s some risk of video quality loss, depending on the settings used.

If you have unlimited disk space, you’ll probably want to re-encode to a lossless format. Practically speaking, nobody has that much disk space.

Most Internet sources advise using something like Handbrake for video conversions, which I’ve used in the distant past and believe it generally works. But I like to automate things so here’s an ffmpeg command that I used to convert an OBS video to CFR:

Your mileage may vary. The important part is the fps=60 filter and the video encoding settings.

* In fact, I did paste that into ChatGPT and asked it to explain the settings and suggest improvements, and, while I was complimented on my excellent settings, I got some new ideas to improve the quality even more. ChatGPT is very good for ffmpeg research, by the way.

So far I’ve only talked about recording videos to local files, because that’s what I do.

But if you’re here looking for info in how to get OBS to stream at a constant frame rate, I have no answers for you. I imagine it’s impossible directly in OBS, and I also imagine it’s unnecessary for most applications.

The only solution I can imagine is to proxy the video streamed from OBS through some kind of transcoding tool that forces the video to CFR. I imagine it can be done by setting up an RTMP server and streaming to that, which then transcodes the video and sends it on to Twitch or wherever. I’ve tinkered with an RTMP server setup in the past but I’ve long since forgotten how to do any of that. Good luck. It ain’t easy.

I have no direct experience with anything other than OBS and GeForce Nvidia Shadowplay in terms of recording game videos. I’m skeptical that other recording software will do any better than OBS, but I asked ChatGPT if there are any OBS alternatives specifically for recording CFR videos and it assured me there are. I don’t necessarily believe it.

My experience with OBS alternatives is as follows:

For my situation, which is mostly script-based and automated, I don’t need to convert OBS video files to CFR before I start using them.

I’m a bit baffled why I’ve never once noticed any problems or issues from OBS recording VFR videos. I think it has to be because I record on a second PC, so there’s an entire computer dedicated to the capturing and encoding process, completely separate from my gaming PC, so the variability in frame rate is fairly low. Every video I checked had an average frame rate of 60 fps, even if there was a non-zero variability.

But going forward, I’ve added an fps=60 parameter to all of my scripts that render videos. From now on, all my uploaded videos, which are the highest quality renders of my OBS videos, will be CFR. Since I’m re-encoding the videos anyway to add the logo in the corner, it makes sense to add in the conversion to CFR at the end.

I don’t expect there to be any noticeable change in the way my videos appear on YouTube, but it makes me feel better.

As for editing OBS videos in Davinci Resolve, I may run a CFR conversation beforehand, but initial tests show it isn’t necessary. In fact, I ran some experiments with the above-mentioned cfrtest.mp4 file and I observed absolutely no difference in the way Davinci Resolve handles the video file between VFR and CFR.

Both with the original OBS file and after conversion to CFR, there were no sync issues whatsoever and the audio lined up perfectly with the video, right to the last frame after 37 minutes. (I’m using Davinci Resolve 19, and I have paid for the pro license because it renders amazingly fast.)

I’m just a simple country programmer, but it seems like a solvable problem for a professional timeline video editor to work with VFR videos, and it seems plausible to me that someone has figured out how to do that somewhere along the relentless march of humankind’s progress into the stars. The armies of Davinci Resolve forum dwellers out there yelling, “Bro, you have to convert to CFR or it won’t work! We’re industry professionals! We know this stuff!” seems outdated to me. Maybe I’m just lucky that it works for me.

Just for fun, I ran an ffprobe command to count the frames and length of an OBS video before and after converting from VFR to CFR.

Before:

After:

My apathy for games continues. Most evenings and weekends I’d rather watch or listen to a show of some kind than play a game.

I did purchase Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, though I haven’t launched it yet. I also bought Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II last year, installed it, and haven’t yet launched it. Those two games are my entire backlog right now.

Other people are talking about Civilization VII and the upcoming Monster Hunter: Wilds, but I don’t have any plans to get either.

Not uploading anything to my channel at the moment, because I’m not playing anything. I played one more episode of Dragon’s Dogma II but I figured I should store up a handful before I start uploading again.

Just today I got a new XLR headset microphone I want to try out. So far I don’t like it.

Most days I sign into work and spend my morning reviewing Slack threads on what’s happened overnight with the half of the team on the other side of the world, and what major changes in team direction have happened since the previous day. Frequently I try to do code reviews in the morning to help expedite work by the India half of the team, and I sometimes get into chat sessions trying to answer questions from the less experienced India developers with their work items. That takes up anywhere from a third to half of my day.

Most team-wide meetings are scheduled right around noon my time, which is night for India, but morning for San Francisco. For me, it’s lunch time, and I frequently don’t get a chance to eat lunch until 1-2 pm. I eat a bigger breakfast now.

Most of the time I only get started on writing code in the afternoon, but it depends on meeting schedules. Meetings interrupt my programming time at about a 1:2 ratio, meaning that for every half hour meeting it subtracts an hour from my programming time, if not more.

I feel like it would be weird not to talk about the new administration in blog posts that are semi-auto-biographical. It’d be like not mentioning the pandemic in 2020. Trump is the only thing anyone’s talking about in this country, or trying desperately hard not to talk about.

It’s been about a month now living in the new lawless U.S. illiberal democracy. So far, it’s comical and incompetent and corrupt and unconstitutional, but there’s been no immediate impact on my daily life.

There’s no sign of any opposition from Democrats, who remain hopelessly anachronistic. There’s been some pushback from the judiciary against the first four weeks of executive tyranny, but lawsuits take years to resolve, which is far too late to stop a persistent agenda to sow chaos.

No time for me to dwell on the federal government, though, because, while you all are lamenting that there’s no viable candidates yet for the 2026 Congressional mid-term elections, let alone the next presidential election in 2028, I’m already in the middle of the 2025 campaign season for the Virginia gubernatorial election just around the corner in November, which will be the next bellweather for the country’s future.

Hopefully my state will still be a good place to live after Trump and Elon finish decimating all of the federal government’s credibility, effectiveness, and world power.

Bye!

I saw Roger is making some game videos, and I remember Scopique posted last year about editing video game videos, which reminded me that I meant to write more about this topic myself. I’ve been relentlessly (some might say quixotically) chipping away at making and uploading videos to my YouTube channel for I guess nine years now, but I’ve never written much about it.

Part of that is my current philosophy to never try to help anyone on the Internet anymore unless I’m asked directly. It’s just better for everyone that way. Mainly me.

Another part is that I can’t help anyone with publicity or “the hustle,” which is arguably the most important aspect of content creation. I just know the technical stuff.

But as it happens, I’m writing this at a time when I’m completely burned out on playing and recording games, so this is a good time for me to do some reflection.

I think the original reason was because I thought it looked like a fun and interesting project, and somewhere around the 2014-2015 range I noticed the tools were readily available and it was easier than ever before.

I was inspired mainly by Masterkizz videos where he played Dark Souls for the first time. I really enjoyed watching how he tackled the same things I had, how he dealt with and overcame those problems, his ongoing analysis of the game systems, and to top it off it looked like he was having a lot of fun in the process. I was struck by how a kind of narrative arc developed in how he played the game from start to finish, almost like a documentary.

I’m still more-or-less copying that same style today.

It turns out that recording game videos brings together a lot of things that I’ve enjoyed doing all my life: Mainly playing games, talking about games, recording sound and using microphones and audio engineering, and tinkering with video. In olden times I did that kind of thing with boom boxes and VHS video tape decks and an Amiga Video Toaster. Now I use OBS.

I’ve been fascinated by recording gameplay in particular since the olden days of Quake, when a revolutionary new thing called FAQ-Proxy came along in 1997. (Note: It is a travesty that Crayola Clan is not listed on that page.)

My clan would record matches and share the demo recordings in IRC afterward to see the match from each others’ perspectives and, in the process, pick up new tips and learn to play better. Also it was the only way at the time for others to see the match if you weren’t in it.

Here is one of the first such FAQ-Proxy recordings to have ever existed on the Internet, at least on the East Coast of the US: A 2v2 match that I played in, which I converted from a demo file to video some years back.

I’m “Salamander” in that video, the one with the purple shirt on the red team, whose best moment of the match, charging into the enemy base with a haste rune to duel 1v2 and return the flag at a crucial time, was unfortunately not captured by the cameraman. Sigh.

These are the main things I get out of recording game videos:

Things you won’t see on that list are:

I don’t know how to do that stuff. Early on, I thought it might be cool to make a few extra dollars a year doing something I enjoyed doing anyway, but then YouTube increased the monetization threshold to one thousand subscribers and that pretty much ended that. Also I don’t really like talking to people so “engagement” is rather difficult for me, which is the most important part of growth. I’d need to hire an intern to do that for me. It’s why I don’t stream on Twitch… I have little interest or patience for monitoring a live chat.

* I’m currently not in the mood for talking. That usually stops me from playing games altogether, because I don’t want to record gameplay without live commentary. Sometimes I do it anyway and record a post-game overdub later, but I find that wastes too much of my time. As I’m typing this, I’m pondering abandoning all of my principles and uploading commentary-free videos anyway just to keep things moving along. But if I were a viewer, I’d hate that, and I’m guided often by making videos I’d want to see.

That’s a big subject. But it gives me a chance to plug a video I made two years ago. I’ve changed some things since I made it (e.g. the type and location of my gaming desk) but it’s still pretty accurate to my current process.

When I made that, I wanted to start making more essay videos like that. When I look at it now, I’m embarrassed I ever thought it was a good idea to publish that. Ah well. Maybe the next one will be better.

For now, I’ll end with a list of software I use, roughly in order of most essential to most optional.

You can see a little bit about how I use those in the video. If you don’t want to watch a video (who can blame you), just plug that video link into NotebookLM and it’ll describe it.

Anything happen since last time?

It’s been persistently sub-freezing most of the last couple of weeks, which saps any energy I might have for doing much of anything in the evenings.

But the handful of times I’ve booted up something on the gaming PC it’s been RimWorld.

I need to revise my anti-hype for gaming in 2025, having previously only seen one game to look forward to all year. That one game is Pathologic 3. Pathologic 2 was such a bizarre and unexpected game world that I look forward to seeing what they come up with next.

But now I can report that I’m looking forward to not two but three games in 2025.

The second one is near release, and it’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. The first one was a bit of an impulse buy, and I have a vague memory that it was controversial for some reason I don’t remember, but I played the whole game and had fun learning the unorthodox game systems. My main memory is that the end of the story sucked. Re-reading that post, I apparently had a lot more complaints about it, but it definitely wasn’t the factory-produced same-as-all-the-others kind of game that is so popular these days, so I’ll give them another shot.

The third one is Solasta II, which doesn’t have a release date yet. I assume it will basically be the same as Solasta 1, except with improved graphics and UI and quality-of-life features. Otherwise I hope they don’t mess with the formula too much, because the tactical systems are pretty good already.

Remember when I used to write posts summarizing games I played so I could link to them in future posts like this one? It was kind of useful when I did that. Too much of a bother now.

Besides, what am I supposed to write in a post about, say, Dragon’s Dogma 2? I walk around a lot and fight variations of the same goblins and harpies around every corner of every road using the same two or three combat abilities I’ve had since the beginning of the game, listening to the same lines of dialog from my pawns repeated endlessly, all while pondering the hidden meaning behind a story that makes no sense culturally or politically. You play two or three hours of Dragon’s Dogma 2 and you’ve pretty much seen the rest of the game. Hard to make 1000 words of riveting prose out of that.

Ran out of videos to upload, thanks to my persistent disinterest in playing more Dragon’s Dogma 2. Sorry if anyone’s out there dying to see the end of that series.

I also gave up on an alternate workflow for recording RimWorld videos. Too much work. The story of the rise and fall of a RimWorld colony can be compelling drama, though. Surely there must be a way to deliver that kind of content in an efficient manner.

I just picked up some audiobooks to listen to. Stay tuned.

Browsing for audiobooks is a horrible experience, by the way. Every time I look, especially in the science fiction and fantasy sections, there’s a new series of 10 books from some author I’ve never heard of that takes up most of the “bestsellers” page, and the descriptions of said books sound like somebody’s first NaNoWriMo draft, or just flat out AI-generated. I feel like we all owe Dan Brown an apology for making fun of the writing in his books. In hindsight, he set the bar for the mass market literary world.

As mentioned, the cold has sapped all my energy. It snowed once but it’s been so cold that it never melted and there’s just been a layer of snow and ice over everything for weeks. Yuck.

Late in the month it finally thawed out back to tolerable winter weather.

Hoo boy folks. Buckle up.

Good luck!